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5 items tagged “misinformation”

2024

The primary use of “misinformation” is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Mike Caulfield, via Charlie Warzel

# 11th October 2024, 3:21 pm / misinformation

2023

Latest Twitter search results for “as an AI language model” (via) Searching for “as an AI language model” on Twitter reveals hundreds of bot accounts which are clearly being driven by GPT models and have been asked to generate content which occasionally trips the ethical guidelines trained into the OpenAI models.

If Twitter still had an affordable search API someone could do some incredible disinformation research on top of this, looking at which accounts are implicated, what kinds of things they are tweeting about, who they follow and retweet and so-on.

# 17th April 2023, 2:28 pm / ethics, twitter, ai, misinformation, openai, generative-ai

2020

Seniors generally report having more trust in the people around them, a characteristic that may make them more credulous of information that comes from friends and family. There is also the issue of context: Misinformation appears in a stream that also includes baby pictures, recipes and career updates. Users may not expect to toggle between light socializing and heavy truth-assessing when they’re looking at their phone for a few minutes in line at the grocery store.

Michael Hobbes

# 29th October 2020, 3:06 pm / social-media, misinformation

2019

The Guardian’s nifty old-article trick is a reminder of how news organizations can use metadata to limit misinformation (via) The Guardian displays prominent banners on news stories from more than a year ago warning that it is an older article to help prevent accidental or intentional spread of misinformation using their content as ammunition. Impressively they also display the year prominently on the card images they serve as social media previews fir older articles.

# 23rd December 2019, 9:36 am / guardian, news, misinformation

2004

Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran (via) Claims the Iranians were feeding misinformation to the US government via Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

# 22nd May 2004, 7:36 pm / misinformation